How Shraddha Sharma worked better for Colgate Visible White than Sonam Kapoor

The presentation that really made us sit up and take notice at the Ads Roundtable during the recently held Google For India event came from Eric Jumbert, VP – marketing, Colgate-Palmolive. At such events, you typically find yourself bombarded by data points and of course slightly alarmist screeds about how the young consumer is a completely different, unfathomable animal. A lot of what we’d really like to know about, like the extent to which digital engagement contributes to actual sales, gets glossed over. And so it was very refreshing to see Colgate-Palmolive apply the same rigorous — some agency folk would say ruthless — measurement criteria it brings to bear on all its communication to branded content.

It also helped that Jumbert did a great job at the presentation. Keen on emphasising how local he’d become through his stint in India, he said “(With Colgate), you need to reach crores of people. For the firangis, that’s tens of millions.”

In the first phase of the campaign for Colgate Visible White, the FMCG used a mix of digital and TV, spending more on the former. The result was a branded content film:

The company then decided to shift all its budgets for the brand to digital. As Jumbert puts it, “We felt confident this was not a bet but calculated play. We were talking share of market and household penetration.”

Getting YouTube content creator Shraddha Sharma generated much more traction than phase 1 according to Jumbert. He says, “Shraddha Sharma was more appealing than a Bollywood celebrity.”

The song was disseminated across all video platforms, song apps and even trended on Twitter. Purchase intent went up, there was an 18% increase in new tries and a rise of 60 base point sales in modern trade.

Here are some of the more interesting observations from the Google For India Ad Roundtable:

Simon Kahn, CMO – APAC, Google:

“We should look at allocating budgets by viewer behaviour and not by buckets. Where is the most important audience, what engages them and what drives greatest results?”

“Online households are twice as valuable as offline ones. But are advertisers paying twice the amount of attention?”